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Call of Duty Ghosts vs. Battlefield 4: Multiplayer Benchmark

11-12-2013, 10:50 PM

Activision and Electronic Arts hold one of the biggest rivalries in the gaming world. They’ve been going neck to neck each year to see who puts out the better military shooter. As gamers, we adore such rivalries between big game publishers because it compels them to innovate and step up their game. So how high should our expectations be with each new installment? First off, we like being spoiled with amazing visuals. And secondly we welcome any new and exciting features that give us a fun and unique gaming experience. Both Call of Duty Ghosts and Battlefield 4 manage to fulfill both our expectations. So what’s going to be the game changer you ask? The multiplayer mode, of course.

Although each title is different in their own way, both share something in common. They are two of the most hardware demanding PC games at the moment. Some users believe that game publishers deliberately print higher hardware requirements to market their game. But what they forget is the fact that gaming is evolving at a lightning fast pace. In the last few years, developers have been able to harvest and perfect new technologies to take advantage of modern hardware. That’s why it’s important to approach new titles with an open mind. No one knows their game better than the developer. If you’re seeing those numbers, then surely it’s for a good reason. Anyways, enough talk and time to frag!

Test System
Our test system is based on the latest Z87 chipset. Here’s the test system in detail.

Special thanks to G.Skill for providing us with the different memory kits for testing.

Special thanks to Seasonic for providing us with the Platinum 860WPSU.

Graphics Settings Used
We used the most demanding preset for each title to put full stress on our test system. You can find the screenshot of the settings used in each game below.

Here’s a summary of the settings used for Call of Duty Ghosts:

And here’s the summary for Battlefield 4:

Testing Methodology
To ensure that we provide an accurate representation of real world multiplayer usage, we decided to play 10 rounds on different maps. The statistics for CPU, RAM and GPU usage were recorded from the beginning of each round until the very end.

We have taken into consideration that each map is unique and the level of stress on our system will vary. Therefore we’ve decided to calculate the median from the 10 individual results from each playthrough.

For Call of Duty Ghosts, we chose to play on a server with 18 players since that is the maximum allowed at the moment of the testing. On the other hand, we joined servers with 64 players on Battlefield 4. While it may seem as an unfair comparison, that’s the limit for each game.

Who’s hungrier for CPU?
Both titles are programmed and optimized to fully take advantage of 4 cores and threads from our i7-4770k. But which game will make our CPU work harder? The results speak for themselves.

The Verdict
Call of Duty Ghosts multiplayer isn’t as CPU intensive as Battlefield 4. That is to be expected considering multiplayer maps on COD: Ghosts is a lot smaller and the fact that there are only 18 players on a server. Battlefield 4 has much bigger multiplayer maps and gaming with another 64 players around the world simultaneously can really tax a CPU. Sure makes running COD:Ghosts like a walk in the park.

Who’s the bigger memory hog?
The recommended amount of RAM for COD: Ghosts is 6GB which is just 2GB shy of what Electronic Arts recommended for Battlefield 4. But do we really need that huge amount of RAM?

The Verdict
Both titles use an insane amount of RAM. But once again Battlefield 4, takes the win here! The truth is that both games only use about half of the amount of RAM that their respective companies recommended. So the big question here is why did they use such big numbers? Easy. Remember that the numbers you are seeing represent the memory used solely by the game. You still have to take into account the other processes that are currently running in your Window’s installation too. Since each system is unique there is no way that a game publisher will know what the average amount of RAM each system use. Better safe than sorry to recommend more RAM to have headroom for the game to breathe.

The Verdict
It’s interesting to see that both BF4 and COD:Ghosts were able to take advantage of higher bandwidth memory. But it looks like the Frostbite 3 engine was capable of squeezing more FPS from faster RAM. The increase might only be a few FPS and seem irrelevant now. But it’s comforting to see that games are starting to exploit modern hardware more and more. If you’re still on 1600MHz, you can still get by for a few. But if you’re putting together a new build, do yourself a favor and get the fastest kit that your budget permits.

Who has a sweeter tooth for VRAM?
My, my, how times change! Remember how it was madness and “unnecessary” to have more than 1GB of VRAM if you’re gaming at 1920x1080?

The Verdict
The greediness is equal among the two. Both ate away every single MB of VRAM that was on the GTX 670. But COD:Ghosts just manage to have a bigger stomach and was able to bring our GTX 670 to its knees. It’d be wise to invest in a GPU with at least 3GB of VRAM on board to ensure that you can handle all the textures, Antialiasing, PhysX, etc…

Nice, been looking for benchmarks like this one for a little while. The coirsair review had a lot of people wondering if the gains were that big. Had some success playing with mine, but my 7870 doesn't quite have the **** to go beyond what it currently gets.

Comment

Activision and Electronic Arts hold one of the biggest rivalries in the gaming world. They’ve been going neck to neck each year to see who puts out the better military shooter. As gamers, we adore such rivalries between big game publishers because it compels them to innovate and step up their game. So how high should our expectations be with each new installment? First off, we like being spoiled with amazing visuals. And secondly we welcome any new and exciting features that give us a fun and unique gaming experience. Both Call of Duty Ghosts and Battlefield 4 manage to fulfill both our expectations. So what’s going to be the game changer you ask? The multiplayer mode, of course.

Although each title is different in their own way, both share something in common. They are two of the most hardware demanding PC games at the moment. Some users believe that game publishers deliberately print higher hardware requirements to market their game. But what they forget is the fact that gaming is evolving at a lightning fast pace. In the last few years, developers have been able to harvest and perfect new technologies to take advantage of modern hardware. That’s why it’s important to approach new titles with an open mind. No one knows their game better than the developer. If you’re seeing those numbers, then surely it’s for a good reason. Anyways, enough talk and time to frag!

Test System
Our test system is based on the latest Z87 chipset. Here’s the test system in detail.

Special thanks to G.Skill for providing us with the different memory kits for testing.

Special thanks to Seasonic for providing us with the Platinum 860WPSU.

Graphics Settings Used
We used the most demanding preset for each title to put full stress on our test system. You can find the screenshot of the settings used in each game below.

Here’s a summary of the settings used for Call of Duty Ghosts:

And here’s the summary for Battlefield 4:

Testing Methodology
To ensure that we provide an accurate representation of real world multiplayer usage, we decided to play 10 rounds on different maps. The statistics for CPU, RAM and GPU usage were recorded from the beginning of each round until the very end.

We have taken into consideration that each map is unique and the level of stress on our system will vary. Therefore we’ve decided to calculate the median from the 10 individual results from each playthrough.

For Call of Duty Ghosts, we chose to play on a server with 18 players since that is the maximum allowed at the moment of the testing. On the other hand, we joined servers with 64 players on Battlefield 4. While it may seem as an unfair comparison, that’s the limit for each game.

Who’s hungrier for CPU?
Both titles are programmed and optimized to fully take advantage of 4 cores and threads from our i7-4770k. But which game will make our CPU work harder? The results speak for themselves.

The Verdict
Call of Duty Ghosts multiplayer isn’t as CPU intensive as Battlefield 4. That is to be expected considering multiplayer maps on COD: Ghosts is a lot smaller and the fact that there are only 18 players on a server. Battlefield 4 has much bigger multiplayer maps and gaming with another 64 players around the world simultaneously can really tax a CPU. Sure makes running COD:Ghosts like a walk in the park.

Who’s the bigger memory hog?
The recommended amount of RAM for COD: Ghosts is 6GB which is just 2GB shy of what Electronic Arts recommended for Battlefield 4. But do we really need that huge amount of RAM?

The Verdict
Both titles use an insane amount of RAM. But once again Battlefield 4, takes the win here! The truth is that both games only use about half of the amount of RAM that their respective companies recommended. So the big question here is why did they use such big numbers? Easy. Remember that the numbers you are seeing represent the memory used solely by the game. You still have to take into account the other processes that are currently running in your Window’s installation too. Since each system is unique there is no way that a game publisher will know what the average amount of RAM each system use. Better safe than sorry to recommend more RAM to have headroom for the game to breathe.

The Verdict
It’s interesting to see that both BF4 and COD:Ghosts were able to take advantage of higher bandwidth memory. But it looks like the Frostbite 3 engine was capable of squeezing more FPS from faster RAM. The increase might only be a few FPS and seem irrelevant now. But it’s comforting to see that games are starting to exploit modern hardware more and more. If you’re still on 1600MHz, you can still get by for a few. But if you’re putting together a new build, do yourself a favor and get the fastest kit that your budget permits.

Who has a sweeter tooth for VRAM?
My, my, how times change! Remember how it was madness and “unnecessary” to have more than 1GB of VRAM if you’re gaming at 1920x1080?

The Verdict
The greediness is equal among the two. Both ate away every single MB of VRAM that was on the GTX 670. But COD:Ghosts just manage to have a bigger stomach and was able to bring our GTX 670 to its knees. It’d be wise to invest in a GPU with at least 3GB of VRAM on board to ensure that you can handle all the textures, Antialiasing, PhysX, etc…

I'm rediscovering my love for older games (not quite OLD, but you get it) and this is such a helpful comparison. THanks.